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How I Met Jerry Seinfeld, Scene 1, Take 2

THERE are three things people think they know about Jessica Seinfeld, the semipublic wife of the popular comedian:

1. Nine years ago she dumped her first husband shortly after their honeymoon, in favor of the richer and more famous Jerry Seinfeld, whom she met at a gym.

2. Recently she published a cookbook, “Deceptively Delicious,” and was accused of plagiarizing another writer’s recipes.

3. After appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to publicize the book, Ms. Seinfeld sent the talk-show host a rather crass thank-you: 21 pairs of expensive high-heeled shoes.

Together such factoids add up to an image of a woman people find easy to disparage. Ms. Seinfeld seems to be one of those physically attractive women, not unlike Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s wife, whom New Yorkers took a faint dislike to on first glance and over many years of relative silence in the news media never really changed their minds about.

Even as her cookbook climbed to No. 1 on how-to best-seller lists last month, Yahoo reported that one of the most-searched phrases was “Jessica Seinfeld plagiarism.” The author of a rival hide-the-veggies book has said some of Ms. Seinfeld’s recipes bear a suspicious similarity to hers.

Meanwhile, a blogger at The Huffington Post studied footage of the shoes given to Ms. Winfrey and estimated their value at $16,000 to $20,000.

Such snarkiness pales beside judgments made at the time of the Seinfelds’ courtship, after she left Eric Nederlander, a scion of the Broadway theater-owning family. “This insignificantly featured girl,” declared a 1999 op-ed column in The Newark Star-Ledger, “was lucky enough to have a wealthy, powerful Jew break with stereotype and offer her the last name of Nederlander. But being more ambitious, the newlywed started timing her workouts at New York’s posh Reebok Club with Jerry’s ...”

OVER the years, Ms. Seinfeld has done little to defend herself publicly. Her husband has tried here and there. In 2002, The New York Times published a letter he wrote in response to a reference to his wife in an article about Mr. Nederlander. Mr. Seinfeld wrote: “The true story of what happened has never been printed, No. 1, because it’s not nearly as interesting as the gossip, and No. 2, because my wife, to her great credit in my opinion, doesn’t have much interest in setting the tabloid record straight.”

He continued: “But if in the future some slight effort could be made to determine the actual events of the story, it would be greatly appreciated by my wife and me.”

Well, here goes.

Last week, Ms. Seinfeld agreed, grudgingly, to be interviewed about some of the events that have defined her public image and that surfaced again as strong sales of her book coincided with the opening last week of Mr. Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie.”

(Although I wrote a book about people who celebrate Festivus, a strange holiday popularized on an episode of “Seinfeld,” I had no personal or professional relationship with her or her husband, and she was as wary of me as she is of any other reporter.)

“I understand that there’s nothing more satisfying to a journalist than to take someone like me who appears to have had an easy life and appears to have now hit the jackpot,” she said, pausing her sentence midstream and fiddling with a bracelet she’d bought on the street from which a large decorative stone had fallen loose. She had ordered lox, scrambled eggs and a toasted bialy at Barney Greengrass, an Upper West Side restaurant near her apartment. “Journalists get a lot of pleasure making me or someone in a situation like mine seem like god-awful people, and that’s always been the assumption about me,” Ms. Seinfeld said.

Friends say she is a devoted wife and stay-at-home mother to her children, ages 2, 4 and 6. She works daily on a charity she founded, Baby Buggy, which since 2003 has channeled 2.3 million items of clothing and baby accessories to needy families in the New York area.

“I know people think she’s this gold-digging social climber,” said Allyson Lieberman, a friend of Ms. Seinfeld’s since college at the University of Vermont and a former editor at The New York Post. “But the girl has worked every day of her life since she graduated from college. It’s not like she’s sitting back in her house eating bonbons and wearing furry slippers.”

For “Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food” (Collins), Ms. Seinfeld spent more than a year puréeing, baking, whipping and stirring in her kitchen to perfect the recipes in her cookbook, some of which she would try out on adult dinner guests. She denies copying anyone’s recipes, and on her Web site she lauds three similarly themed cookbooks, because “parents need all of the help they can get.” On “Late Show With David Letterman” last week, Mr. Seinfeld chided Missy Chase Lapine, the author of “The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals” (Running Press) for implying his wife committed “vegetable plagiarism.” (Ms. Lapine told The Times last month, “I suppose it’s possible it’s a coincidence.”)

Friends who have eaten Ms. Seinfeld’s cooking support her claims of originality. “You couldn’t go to her house and not have her hiding something in your food,” said William Norwich, a columnist for Vogue and a friend of the Seinfelds. He complimented her as a host. “She invites people to bring children,” he said. “She mixes ages, politics, gay, straight and in-between.”

That her marriage to Mr. Seinfeld has put the former Jessica Sklar in an A-list world where she has made the kind of famous friends who provoke jealousy in outsiders is undeniable. She arranges play dates for her children in the Hamptons with Ali Wentworth, an actress who (in addition to playing Jerry’s girlfriend in the Soup Nazi episode of “Seinfeld”) is married to George Stephanopoulos of ABC. After Sarah Easley, an owner of the SoHo boutique Kirna Zabête, became involved in Baby Buggy, she and Ms. Seinfeld became friends and see each other in Montauk, where Ms. Seinfeld is taking surfing lessons. Ms. Seinfeld befriended the designer Narciso Rodriguez, who, in turn, has designed custom gowns for her.

It doesn’t help her image that many New Yorkers consider her husband a kind of personal friend and sometimes perceive her as blocking access to him.

“Over the years there have been various people who think being in a relationship with me either personally or professionally means total access to my husband, for their personal and professional fulfillment,” she wrote in an e-mail message after the interview. “Those people have been disappointed in me. I think it is safe to say that I am slow to warm, cautious and careful.”

IT seems unlikely that the hostility over the book accusations or the Oprah gift would be nearly as sharp were it not for what many consider Ms. Seinfeld’s original sin — the circumstances in which she met Mr. Seinfeld.

She said she did not leave Mr. Nederlander for the comedian. Her first marriage was irreparably broken, she said, before she met Mr. Seinfeld. She said that she and Mr. Nederlander had been having problems even before their wedding on June 13, 1998 — they were in couples therapy, she says — but she lacked the courage to leave him.

Within two days of returning to New York from her honeymoon in early July, however, she began moving possessions from Mr. Nederlander’s apartment to her grandmother’s in Manhattan. “She basically went right to my grandmother’s house from the airport,” her older sister, Rebecca Shalam, said.

On Aug. 7, Ms. Sklar was at the Reebok gym on the Upper West Side, wearing headphones and filling a water bottle, when she first met Mr. Seinfeld, she recalled. “I was going through a difficult time, and I was approached by Jerry Seinfeld and he attempted to make me laugh, and I was really not interested in being entertained at that moment.”

She walked away. He persisted. “He came around again and said something funny, and I actually had to laugh.”

She agreed to attend his taping of an HBO special two nights later. Soon after, she confided that she had just broken up with someone. “I told him I didn’t think this was the right time for me to be involved with anybody,” she said. “I told him the story and he looked at me with such compassion and said, ‘Give me a hug.’ I barely know this person and all he has is compassion for how much pain I was in.

“And he said, ‘Let me tell you a story about what I did,’ and he had done the exact same thing. Except he cut his engagement off before he got married.”

Ms. Seinfeld’s account contradicts the unfolding of events as described in the news media at the time — namely, that she left her husband for the comedian — and which her own statements seemed to confirm.

In late August 1998, The Daily News ran a gossip item about the budding relationship between her and Mr. Seinfeld under the headline “Jerry and a Mrs. Get Physical.” It quoted the newlywed Ms. Sklar saying that she was just friends with Mr. Seinfeld, that “there’s no romantic interest whatsoever” and that her husband thought the relationship was “funny.” Mr. Nederlander was quoted saying, “our relationship, it couldn’t be more solid.”

If that was untrue, why did she say it, and why did she not clarify to the media in the ensuing months that her marriage had been effectively over before she met Mr. Seinfeld?

She answered that last week in an e-mail message: “I had never been in a gossip column before, and I was completely unprepared for what was about to happen. I was a 26-year-old trying to gracefully correct a mistake in judgment,” she wrote, referring to her first marriage. “But I hadn’t yet come clean, even to some of my own family, about the disintegration of my marriage or the dysfunctional relationship that preceded it. So when columnists first asked about Jerry and me, overwhelmed and under tremendous pressure, I compounded the mistake. I denied the truth, naïvely trying to protect everyone involved, including Eric, from the pain of the break-up and from the embarrassment of public humiliation.”

Mr. Nederlander, whose second wife gave birth to the couple’s first baby two weeks ago, was reluctant to rehash the past when reached by telephone last week. But he disputed much of Ms. Seinfeld’s version of events. “She’s trying to make the past look like it never existed,” he said, “so people don’t look at her anymore as a bad person.”

By September 1998, having left her husband, Ms. Sklar had little money to hire a publicist and stopped returning gossip reporters’ calls. She married Mr. Seinfeld on Dec. 25, 1999.

These days she can afford publicity consultants, but she is not always so polished at handling her image. After appearing on “Oprah” to promote her cookbook, she sent Ms. Winfrey the 21 pairs of shoes that led to ridicule in the blogosphere. (Ms. Winfrey showed a video of the shoes when Mr. Seinfeld, plugging “Bee Movie,” appeared later on the show.)

A spokeswoman for Ms. Seinfeld said the shoes’ actual value was less than $10,000, not in the $20,000 neighborhood. Last week Ms. Seinfeld was unapologetic. She sent the shoes in gratitude to Ms. Winfrey, she said, for inviting her to talk about healthy cooking for children. The exposure helped propel the book up best-seller lists. Part of the proceeds goes to charity. “I guess I gave an over-the-top gift for an over-the-top move on Oprah’s part for putting me on her show,” she said.

Ms. Winfrey, a billionaire, is not the easiest woman to shop for, she added. “Tell me, what would you get Oprah?”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: How I Met Jerry Seinfeld, Scene 1, Take 2. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe